In this TED lecture, A guided tour of the Ghost Map, Steven Johnson gives and excellent presentation of key aspects leading up to and including John Snow’s famous map centred on the Broad Street pump in London. Although about a dark subject–cholera–his talk is laced with black humour. (British, of course.)

For those following the XMRV saga, or who simply like intrigue, the latest twist is that lead researcher Judy Mitovits, formerly of the Whittemore Peterson Institute–she was dismissed some time ago–has been arrested for theft of materials from the WPI.

Mikovits proposed that the retrovirus Xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus (XMRV) was associated with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), in a study published in Science. Other researchers found that they could not confirm Mikovits’ earlier results. Since then a number of studies have indicated the that XMRV observed is contamination of the samples.

One criteria for me, personally, is if the image can tell it’s own story without needing a caption. Taken with the caption, all shown tell great stories.

I’d present a few of these in my post, but the copyright thingy looks off-putting. Those I had a mind to use, with some connection to the natural world as an excuse of keeping this somewhat related to science, where images 3, 8, 17, 24 and 25.

Chase those sources to the ground – I’ve written elsewhere on this blog that wikipedia is best viewed as a started point, from which you then want to verify. xkcd seems to think much the same, illustrating something found in a recent popular science book with this cartoon (xkcd’s rollover text is in the legend):

Not very surprisingly this as left several in the science writing community trying to guess what the book was. (I’m not even going to try.)

I find when someone's taking the time to the right in the present, they're a perfectionist with no ability to prioritize, whereas when someone took the time to do something right in the past, they're a master artisan of great foresight.

It’s the classic dilemma, isn’t it.

Faced with coding a new bit of functionality, do you write the version that solves only your immediate problem or do you think ahead and try cater for future, more varied, uses too?

Perhaps you want to find that middle ground; lay it out enough that the opportunity for future generalisation is documented well enough and sufficiently in place so that you can move on in peace, having noted the opportunity and laid the tracks for future development without having expended too much effort.

Reading Cath Ennis’ handwritten blog post–do check it out–I was left thinking: will a later generation not use handwriting at all?

Remember those biology exams with their essays? Or those endless lectures frantically scribbling down notes?

I still record thoughts for most talks using a notebook, but I have to admit my writing is now terrible and I can almost certainly type faster.

Like Cath the quality of my writing has deteriorated as I have gotten older. Like commenters to her post, I can’t write furiously for hours any more. But my typing has–slowly!–improved.

For many–most–things it’d be more practical to type rather than write.

There is the issue of doodles and sketches. They’re useful when taking notes. Not to mention those wayward arrows that you add after the fact, with their long twisty lines wandering around the page connecting one point with another.

Below I have tried to organise the live discussion into something that I hope is useful to others. This material was gathered and written on-the-fly; the bulk of the material is ‘as delivered’.

As I’ve done previously, the bits in square brackets are my own thoughts added at the time.

The material below is roughly grouped to follow themes with the content of each section in chronological order.

I have run-together some tweets that were multi-part to make this more readable.

Usual disclaimer: any errors introduced are my own!

There is also a ‘chirpified’ version of the twitter chat, thanks to Ruth Seeley (@ruthseeley); this has more content, but then I hope my presentation groups the material in a way that is useful to readers.

ScienceOnline2011 is the sixth of the annual gatherings of the on-line science communication community at Raleigh, North Carolina.

Even if you have no intention of attending, but are interested in science communication, it’s worth reading the draft programme - the ideas in there should give you plenty to think about. (There is so much in the programme that I’m left wondering how participants are supposed to choose what sessions to attend.)

Vincent Racanielo was writing in the context of the continued saga over proposals of a link between the mouse XMRV virus (xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus) and chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). My interest here is not on this particular saga,[1] intriguing as it might be, but on the wider issue of who or what do you trust.

He closes his article writing,

There are many lessons to be learned from XMRV, but an important one is that science progresses not from the work of a single investigator, but from the collective efforts of many laboratories. XMRV reminds us to trust science, not scientists.

One useful way to view new research papers, is as an argument for a case that has yet to be heard by a jury of their peers–the in-house peer-review of the research journal not withstanding.[2]

It’s a cautiousness and a willingness to critique, rather than accept at face value; Science’s community-based sanity filter. Read the rest of this entry »

As many of my readers will be aware, my work area and research interests are in computational biology[1] – the wider field is better known as bioinformatics.

Biology has long been a core subject at high school.

Computer science is now well established too.

Bioinformatics takes computer science and applies it to biological questions. Given that the basic principles are straight-forward and can be allied to basic biology, it seems reasonable that it could be taught at a high school level too.

I can imagine doing this myself, not that I’ll ever be in the position of doing it.

Two articles in PLoS Computational Biology address teaching bioinformatics at high school:

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